Mad Max review: 'epic and suitably dangerous'

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Everything in Mad Max’s world has heft; even the thick plume of scorched dust that billows from your blackened bumpers feels dense. It’s this physicality, from the fumbling nature of Max’s desperate fisticuffs, to the sheer grunt of a V6 motor as you belt across the salt flats of an evaporated seabed, that gives weight to everything in this beautiful, twisted and iconic dustbowl.

Forget this year’s fantastic Mad Max: Fury Road, though, as you won’t see any of Tom “The Hardman” Hardy here. Warner Bros has, quite cleverly, cashed in on the opportunity of making a universe tie-in, but avoided any sense of narrative obligation to revolve its game around the events leading up to, or after that movie. The result is something entirely removed and, at its core, fresh.

The Max you play here is much more in line with Miller’s original vision - Australian, for one, and not almost entirely mute for the proceedings. Max’s story is a familiar tale of revenge, but for majority of the game the main plot fades into the background, save for key story moments that exist simply to push the exposition forward. This works mostly in the game’s favour, towing a steady balance between letting you get on with the good stuff - blowing up other cars and exploring its world - while keeping you aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Credit:
Sam White

Max starts, as he often does, by losing everything. This time, that loss comes at the hands of Scabrous Scrotus - the son of Fury Road’s Immortan Joe and the game’s focal big-bad. Having woken in the sand, battered, bloodied and bereft of his beloved car, Max utilises the help of a black-fingered mechanic named Chumbucket to help him build a new motor, the Magnum Opus. Your aim is simple: to upgrade and modify the Opus enough to eventually make your way across the Plains of Silence, for reasons that are never fully explained but never really matter. There are logical irregularities in Max’s world rules that require some suspension of disbelief, but these are minor niggles in a game that asks you to do business with a woman called Pink Eye.

To progress, you need to call in some favours from the local warlords and faction leaders, who expect favours in return. What ensues is a rote open world game, but one that’s built on top of such an intriguing setting that the game’s mechanical repetition doesn’t have much bearing on the fun. Scrotus’ grip on the world is tight, but by defeating his smaller encampments, taking on his Top Dog warlords, dismantling his giant convoys that tour the wasteland, destroying intimidating totems, clearing minefields and taking out scout snipers dotted across the map, you’ll diminish the warlord’s presence in the wastes. Repeating these tasks opens up new upgrades, while also netting you a regular supply of scrap from the allies that move in to take over any fallen enemy camps.

The Opus is not much to look at when you first start out; a rusted piece of crap that just about holds its own. But, put some time into lowering Scrotus’ influence, seeking out new parts and collecting scrap - the game’s currency for upgrading - and you begin to get somewhere. Making modifications to your setup fantastic fun, and it’s this feedback loop of continuous rewards where the game so strongly succeeds. You want to do everything the game throws at you because of what you get in return, and the fact that all the changes you make are represented visually on the Opus and Max is incredibly satisfying.

Credit:
Sam White

The car combat is demolition derby ratcheted up to deadly, made more stylish with the inclusion of a ramming boost nitro attack and a physics-defying sideswipe for when you’re hurtling alongside enemies. After a few dozen hours I had taken the Magnum Opus from a failed scrapheap challenge to a growling powerhouse. The engine roars and the plumes of black smoke that erupt from the exhaust pipes upon ignition never gets old. There are dozens of different vehicle types to hunt and specialisations to build. The Opus has its own on-board arsenal, too, including a harpoon that rips drivers from their seats and tyres from their axles, and devastating explosive javelins that blow entire cars into flaming shrapnel in joyously gratifying explosions. There are flamethrowers to fit to the sideboards, razor rims for tearing other vehicles to shreds, and huge spikes to stop feral wastelanders from mounting your vehicle during combat. Everything comes back to that sense of weighty desolation and destruction, and it makes Mad Max’s car combat the game’s shining success.

Even when you’re not battling with other cars, the simple act of driving from point to point feels epic and suitably dangerous. Mad Max’s world is similar to wastelands you’ve played before, but few are quite this barren, beautifully crafted and surprisingly varied. Starting off in the remnants of an old ocean where huge shipwrecks dot the landscape and giant oil-rigs strut out of the sand. As you progress further ‘in-land’ you’ll find the remains of coastal civilisation, collapsed pylons, factories, huge highways and gas stations left to dry out in the sun. There are oil fields bubbling as Scrotus’ henchmen scour the wasteland for any fuel, and sulfuric vents surrounding an enormous volcano that once sat at the bottom of the ocean. There are canyons and sand dunes, and the thick heat haze makes the world feel scorching. As the blinding blue sky turns to a crimson reddish dusk, and into the cold dead blue of night, the world changes drastically. The sky boxes create a tangible sense of scope and atmosphere in all weather conditions, and it’s truly spectacular. And when the colossal mega storms roll in, causing the screen to be entirely clouded in dust, cascading winds and flying debris, all while lightning strikes the ground just feet from your car, you need to hunker down and find a stronghold suitable to hide from the destructive weather.

Outside the car, Avalanche borrows - and drastically simplifies - its melee combat from the Batman Arkham series. A two-button attack/parry system are all that Mad Max can muster, and the simplistic nature of its brawls never compares to the frantic, explosive action you see almost constantly in the Opus. The inclusion of a shotgun adds extra combustive spice, but supplies are sparse and letting off shots is always a treasured luxury you’ll wait to use sparingly, rather than rely on. Levelling Max’s combat abilities up add more contextual options for beating thugs with shivs, pipes and your bare fists, but it’s a far cry from the smooth, flowing fights of Batman.

Credit:
Sam White

As well as ammo, Max drains any last drops from water pipes into his canteen, eats the maggots from decaying corpses, and will scavenge any and all ruins for gas cans to store extra fuel in the back of the Opus. The need to find all three of these resources is always present on the HUD, but it never becomes overbearing and serves mostly to root you in Max’s world.

With so many activities to offer progression, the game also contains collectible historical relics you find across the wasteland, but the environmental storytelling falls flat here. Max himself is melodramatic about the things he finds, but the individual stories themselves are utterly forgettable and occasionally laughable; you just want to get back on the road and onto the next activity. Elsewhere, the game often fails to give clear instructions for missions - on one particular objective I thought I’d reached a game breaking bug, only to find out I simply had to ignore what the mission marker was telling me, go somewhere else, and the mission would complete.

There’s definitely a sense that, like Max himself, Avalanche’s latest game has been left alone to find its own way to greatness. But the studio has given the series the attention to detail and authenticity that it deserves, and this is without doubt one of the most punchy examples of gaming post apocalyptia in quite some time. It contains obvious missteps and a clear reliance on repeating objectives at a time when the open world genre has taken leaps forward, but for all its repetition, it never became boring. For all its barren desolation, I was never without things to do, find or see to continue my satisfying path of progression. Released at an inopportune time, Mad Max is stood next to much bigger, bolder releases, revving just loud enough to be heard among the noise.